1. Technical Field
The invention generally relates to financial systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for creating an investment portfolio.
2. Related Art
Investing over the Internet has become commonplace. On-line brokers and brokerage sites enable all types of investors to engage in trading activities. These trading activities include trading stocks, options, etc. on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, American Stock Exchange, and foreign exchanges. In addition, investors may trade futures, currencies, mutual funds, and the like in respective exchanges.
In addition to trading over the Internet, investors may also track their investments over the Internet. Trading houses (for example, Ameritrade) allow investors to monitor the value of their account on-line. Some companies permit investors to create portfolios that permit monitoring of the portfolios over a period of time (for example, Yahoo! Finance). With Yahoo! Finance, however, investors are constrained to enter separately the quantity and purchase price of each stock. While allowing an investor to monitor accurately a stock or portfolio from a specific starting value, the exercise of separately entering each stock's quantity and purchase price can become tedious when creating watch accounts.
Watch accounts (also known as watch account portfolios or watch portfolios) are portfolios that have been created to monitor stocks (or, more generally, issues) over time. An example of a watch account is available at the Clearstation Internet website. Here, an investor may designate a watch account with a number of stocks and display how those stocks have changed since the watch account was first created. However, no method exists to assign an initial starting value to the watch account or to designate a number of shares purchased. Clearstation also supports the use of default values when creating a normal portfolio. The default values in Clearstation are defined as the quantity of shares needed to have a total investment in a stock be equal to $10,000. So, if one was to designate five stocks and select the default values option, the portfolio is created with enough shares of each stock so the initial investment in each stock was $10,000 on the day the stock was added to the account. However, the approach shown by Clearstation for using the default valuation of $10,000 for each holding fails to adequately mirror the monitoring situations needed by investors watching a stock or set of stocks. There is no provision for designating a fixed number of shares, designating a total valuation of a portfolio, or altering the date upon which the issues are initially priced. Because of these shortcomings, alternative methods of designating portfolios are needed.